There has been much hand-wringing recently in the national media about the plight of their colleagues in local newspapers, whose commercial base has been eroded by the combination of Internet advertising, the recession and declining sales. It is also a concern for local authorities which have, needless to say, been partly blamed for the local print media's demise by launching their own council magazines and newspapers. Indeed, culture secretary, Andy Burnham, is due to pronounce soon on whether this constitutes anti-competitive behaviour on the grounds that council newspapers are subsidised by the taxpayer (see page 5). As ever, the picture is more complex. My own experience as a local newspaper reporter left me with fondness for the medium and its capacity to forge links with its community, but little respect for its management, which focused on the short term. In recent years, with the property boom, local publishers have done well, earning high profit margins on provincial evening monopolies but again, with little thought for the future. So long as the revenue flowed, the underlying problems of the long-term decline in readership and the heavy reliance on classified advertising, in particular, council advertising such as statutory tenders, was never addressed. Cuts in reporting staff also reduced the amount of local news. Nor did it seem to occur to publishers that having their local newspapers regularly trash their councils on the one hand, while collecting substantial advertising revenue from them on the other, was conducive to a long-term relationship. Councils also realised that local newspaper circulation reached out to only a slice, and an ageing slice, of their public. So, it is inevitable that many councils produce their own media to get their message across as part of their communications function, and that to ensure costs are low, they attract local advertising at a commercial rate. Whether this should be online or offline must be a matter for them. Nonetheless, the demise of local print media is a concern for councils because it leaves an information gap. Despite the Internet, community, voluntary publications continue to meet a need, even if local newspapers do not as people still take close interest in their areas. It is this gap which councils now must increasingly address. Michael Burton, Editor, The MJ
